Well, in the same way that the President and Secretary Clinton were sure that Donald Trump was undermining America by claiming (rightfully so, based upon the Wikileaks e-mails) that the nomination and election system was rigged. When you have a major party colluding with the media, you have a major party using its control of the executive and legislative branches to attack and restrain political action by their opponents, isn't that a rigged system?

CSR has several "receive-and-forward-in-sync" chipsets available. Of course, Apple doesn't like CSR for iOS type devices (hence no AptX for iOS, but AptX for OSX). But then, if they used the proven, off-the-shelf solution they couldn't brag about their W1 chip (which apparently doesn't work as well as the existing solutions), so... Courage?

Wage slavery is never cost effective except for the slave owner. That's what makes it an unstable system which can only be perpetuated by government collusion, or lack of willpower by the employees to break out of slavery. e.g. Detroit used to have slave-level wages. Henry Ford decided to set up shop there and paid his factory workers much more than the prevailing wage. He accidentally discovered that when he paid people a fair wage, not only did their productivity increase, but they used those wages to buy the very product they were helping build. The resulting feedback loop multiplied his company's revenue and turned the Ford Motor Company into the behemoth it is today. No longer were cars affordable only to the privileged elite; the average middle class worker (by Ford factory standards) could afford to buy one.

If the only options you see are being a wage slave or starving to death, then you haven't really tried. A location where the people are being paid slave wages or starving is ripe for a new company to set up shop and hire willing employees for less than they'd have to pay at well-established locations. As more of these people become employed and spend their wages on local merchants, the economy picks up. There are fewer unemployed, resulting in wages increasing. This is how the market equalizes geographic wage inequality. If this isn't happening, then there are fundamental problems with the region not caused by slave wages. Maybe the location is too far from markets, or the highway/railroad access is poor, or people just don't want to live in that location. Unless the government is intentionally keeping business out, low wages are a symptom not a cause.

And yes I've had a rent check bounce. A rent check a tenant gave me. I was stupid and deposited it directly into our payroll bank account since it almost exactly topped off the amount we needed to make payroll. Normally I transfer the payroll money from our primary checking account, but I was lazy and decided to save a little work by depositing the checks directly into payroll. As a result I got charged a bounced check fee, but more importantly a bunch of my employees' paychecks bounced, causing more bounced check fees for both them and myself. The whole thing was a disaster. I called in each employee who was affected, apologized to them in person, and told them to bring in their bank statement so I could reimburse their bounced check fee (or fees if they then wrote checks which bounced). The ones who needed the money immediately, I paid in cash out of my own pocket. All told it was over $1300 in bank fees incurred because I was stupid/lazy, and because the person who wrote the first check did so knowing he didn't have enough money to cover it but thought it would be easier turning his problem into my problem.

It's cliche, but it's true. Your employees are your most valuable asset. A good business will do everything it can to protect them and to retain them. A business which pays slave wages is just ripe to be squeezed out by a business which will pay better (fair) wages. The only way a slave wage business can stay in business is if the government is blocking competing businesses, or if people like you have so discouraged others with your gloom and doom hopeless corporate feudalism talk that they don't even bother trying to start up their own business to compete.

Running against Hillary probably wouldn't have gotten her anywhere anyway; Bernie tried it and look where it got him. The DNC had everything rigged in Hillary's favor, so Warren wouldn't have had a chance there. Maybe that's why she didn't want to run. But if offered a VP spot, that might have gotten her interest because then she wouldn't have had to run against Hillary, and would have at least been able to supposedly have an effect on Hillary's positions. Maybe she wasn't ready, but it's not like she's some youngster either, she's in her 50s or 60s now I think.

$14,000 annual gift exclusion. I can gift someone $N, and let them choose the charity for the donation. They won't pay income tax on it, but they will receive the benefit of applying the donation to their next tax filing.

It isn't likely to mess up too many people's taxes. Most full time employees aren't getting near their $14k/year gift limit. (per person, so if jointly filing it's effectively $28k)

You're kidding, but it's not far from the truth. I've have essentially this proposition before. That if I worked on their little start-up project they'd make a donation in my name, but when I dig into the details they get to pick the charity and would still be adding it to their own tax filing, not mine. And yes, I received insults when I refused to accept their offer.

The tax deduction isn't money you get back from the government. It's the government saying they wont' tax the income you ended up donating to charity. As such, there is no difference between the company "giving" you the money to donate (counts as income on your taxes) and you getting the tax write-off (government doesn't tax that income), vs the company donating the money in your name (doesn't count as income, you don't get a tax deduction).

e.g. Say I'm at the 25% tax bracket. Company gives me $4000 to donate to a charity, which I do. Come tax time, the government says you received $4000 in income from your company so you owe $1000 in taxes. But you say I donated that $4000 to charity. The extra $4000 gets erased (deducted) from your income, and you're no longer liable for the $1000 in taxes. It's as if you never received the money at all, and the company gave it directly to the charity instead of to you. (Except if the company had given it, they would get the $4000 deduction to reflect that the money was donated. But that just equalizes the direct donation scenario to if they had paid it to you $4000 as wages - a deductible expense. Rather than kept it as taxable profit. Either way, the government is not taxing the money that changed hands because the final recipient is a charity.)

So it doesn't matter whether the company or the employee gets the deduction - it works out the same either way. (There are rare instances where the tax law is specifically or accidentally crafted to give you a tax deduction even though you never received the income. I ran across one of these a couple years back when i donated some stock to a charity. I received a deduction as if I'd sold the stock thus receiving the proceeds as taxable income, then donated the money to the charity. Except since I never sold the stock, I didn't have any taxable income to report for this stock. True, I had paid taxes on the money I used to first buy the stock, but the stock had appreciated a considerable amount and my deduction was actually several times larger than my initial cash outlay to buy the stock. So these situations are not impossible. But they are the exception to how deductions work, not the norm.)